This post is about a hackathon “ Moz Hack Day ” which was held in USIT for every student who was interested in A-Frame on 16 December 2017.

Agenda:-

Talking About VR, WebVR & A-Frame.

Demo of basic A-Frame scenes.

Basic concepts of A-Frame.

Addons Concepts & implementation.

Hands-On Addons development.

The event was started by the introduction speech, following with introduction of A-Frame and speaker also gave a look-up to attendees upon previously created ideas with A-Frame.

I, first of all, introduced myself and interacted with students by sharing my experience.I then started the event by introducing some basic stuff about WebVR like Mozilla and it’s mission of better and safe web, Mozilla’s initiative on making web more approachable, later also told them about MozActivate initiative and then, explained virtual reality, hardware compatible headsets and their technology, friction of VR ecosystem.

I also explained what is WebVR, and how amazing it’s development process and results could be by showing them some cool a-scenes stuff I developed before then, Explained A-Frame documentation and gave it’s website source which is (aframe.io), I requested attendees to have a view over A-Frame documentation but later explained it.

I then explained and showed them the basic example “ Hello World ” of A-Frame, which helped them to understand the basics of A-Frame development. Some Students raised there questions and it was good to see their doubts and curiosity to know better and understand deeply the concepts and those doubts were cleared.

I then explained about languages we need with A-Frame.I explained then about entity component system, about a-painter, then about registry, and at last about community.Then, we had our first refreshment break which included Tea, cold-drinks and wafers (according to attendees), then we started our development process.

After Tea break now, attendees started coding and creating their ideas and imaginations. Few of the students were good with A-Frame development and were creating really good stuff, which includes 360 image and 360 video scenes which were great. Now it was the time for Lunch break.

Now after lunch attendees again started coding what they were left before lunch and developers and students who were creating some good stuff were coding faster for completing their project, and it was good to see students collaborating which feels like a hackathon or an informative session.

As the session was just getting finished and there were just 30 minutes left, most of the developers had finished their development process and they were getting ready for submitting what they had created.

Now session concluded and I thanked all the attendees and developers who were coding and created great stuff.

Dussehra, Saturday, Sept 30th, while many students were enjoying the festival week at their places, Moz-NIEC conducted the class, it commenced at 11 am, sharp, as the team came before the scheduled time and hence, were ready to teach the basics of JS.

I, frankly, thought that, conducting class on Dussehra wasn’t a good idea, as many students have already made plans with their family and would not prefer the class over their famliy. But to my surprise, around 55 students came, despite saying ‘no’ in the WhatsApp group.

Each team member told about their personal experience, working with JavaScript, and how it is useful in the modern day browser. Some students haven’t even studied C/C++, so we started with basics of every programming language, If, else. First, team wrote the code and showed it to the class, by using the projector, then, explained each and every word of the code, and, for some reason, someone is not able to understand the code, the team members, spread out in the class, go to their desks and, if the doubt is something important that the member, who was teaching, hadn’t emphasized a lot on. The doubt is then, cleared on the projector for everyone to see. This repo has been updated as promised.

Students, who were attending the class for the first time, were given links to read through, and each team member were assigned the new students to help them understand whatever was taught in the previous classes and were added in the group so that, they may discuss their doubts.

We gave them some tasks as homework. At the very end, We told them that Mozilla-NIEC is conducting a hackathon Moz-Hack on Oct 14 2017, and invites all developers and hackathon enthusiasts to participate in the hackathon. The next class is scheduled to be on next weekend. We intend to continue javascript in that session.

Sunday, Sept 24th, a day after our first term exams got over, we thought that the turnout of the students would be less, but, to our surprise, almost 50 students came.
We had set the projectors, laptops,extensions cords, etc quicker than the last time, and also before time as moz niec team came early.Moz-NIEC team taught different styling and, customising the look and feel of the website, and sending all the code into an external file i.e. CSS file. And gave a hint about the next class on JS.
Many new students came, so, the team members went to their desk and personally made them understand all that was being taught in the class. Presently, many students ask their doubts in the WhatsApp group, and from the team, whoever is free, solves their doubts. This repo has been updated as promised.

This is when the journey begins. It wasn’t the easiest of task to make announcements in every single class at the top of our voices, but it turned out unexpectedly overwhelming.

The response was just fantastic. More than 40 students showed up even before we did (we were punctual). And then adding up to near about 65 by the commencement of the class.

The plan was crystal clear, this was the first time coding experience for many of the first year students, and we wanted it to be as basic as we wanted it to be interesting.

We started off with who we are, how we are what we are and most importantly WHY we (and the students) are here. Being straightforward open source enthusiasts, it wasn’t as difficult for us ‘Mozillians’ to make our students fall in love with open source as it once might have seemed.

The response was not only overwhelming when it came to attendance but also equally amazing when it came to respone of the students towards what is being taught.

By the end of the 4 hour long workshop, where everyone seemed interested throughout, we as ‘teachers’ were delighted to conduct a successful workshop on HTML and more importantly why is it important to be a programmer, a creator.

The students, we feel, felt amazing. And we expect an even more audience the next time.

Some photos of the class 🙂 . You can find me. I am the guy with Hike T-shirt 😛

So about this event Pushpita told me at the home of Ajay Sir that Mozilla team is going there for 2 sessions, one is of VR and another one on Mozilla Extensions. So after the last event on Mozilla Extension on 19 August , i started learning about how to make Mozilla Extensions and got idea about how to make simple Mozilla Extensions. So Pushpita asked me to join her and Tushar on the trip and i said yes in few seconds 😛 . So in this way this trip was planned. So after came back to home i booked the tickets of round trip in hurry :D. We boarded the train to Chandigarh on 15th September at 7 PM and reached Hotel around 11 PM.

<h1> Day 1 </h1>

So next day we went to Panjab University. Tanish was here who invited Mozilla to Chandigarh. There is such a nice arrangement , and more than 250 students were in Auditorium. So the session on VR is from 11 AM. Tushar started session with introducing Mozilla and then a hour talk about how can we develop VR project and showed audience some cool projects on VR.

After that Pushpita introduced all to Woman in Mozilla in 15 20 minutes lightning talk.

And the crowd at the Auditorium 😀

So after that we have a good time to see the beauty of Chandigarh as we got free around 1 PM from there. So we booked Cab and roam in Chandigarh. We visited Elante Mall and Sukhna Lake. We also did boating, it was my first experience of boating. The beauty of Sukhna Lake is unbelievable .

After that we moved to Iskcon Temple. So in this way our Day 1 ended.

<h1> Day 2 </h1>

On second there was only a hands on session of Mozilla on Mozilla Extensions at 2 PM. So we planned to move to Rock Garden before Session.

After that we move to College and the session started and audience was quite interested in Mozilla Extensions and more than 80% of attendees developed there first Mozilla Extension in less than a hour called as “Borderify”

So after this talk We discussed with Team of Event about Mozilla Campus club at Panjab University. So now it was the time to get back to home :'(. We moved to Railway Station of Chandigarh and reached here Delhi at 11 PM

It was a nice experience and a awesome trip. I wish for a next trip to Chandigarh. Its a beautiful city , No traffic , awesome weather and the best part is the helping nature of the people of Chandigarh.

So this was the event for i was working for around 2 weeks before the date of event. As a organiser it was my second event , other was Mozilla NIEC Activate. This time i was making this free workshop more bigger and useful. We were making arrangements for around 100+ attendees so there was a lot of stuff had to manage like refreshments for all, event poster , and main work was to make announcements in every class in our college especially in first year students classrooms so that to involve more students from freshman years. So there was all set and on D-Day 19th of August , I landed in Delhi around 6 AM on 19th , i was so tired. After came to Delhi i went home and grabbed the standy of Mozilla , and then went to college for all setup.As there was a huge response from interested students, we have more than 270 registration, but in last i sent 130 invitations based on their Javascript Expertise and also the strength of Auditorium is for 130 peoples only 😦 . So i reached college around 9.30 AM, Pushpita , the mentor of this event was waiting on main gate of college 😦 .

So the attendees started to come to college and so till 10:30 AM we have 60+ attendees in the auditorium so we started the event with what is Mozilla and then we had a little session on Javascript till 12 AM, till now almost 100 students in Auditorium then Trishul ( Mozilla Add-Ons Developer ) introduced all of us about “Mozilla Add-Ons” and how to develop those. Then around 1 PM we had a little break for snacks which i ordered already and reached college on time :P. After that the core development of Add-ons started. So Trishul started event with a simple add-on which will just adds a color border to any pages loaded from “mozilla.org” or any of its subdomains. So i am trying here to explain how we can make this extension I hope all of you will understand it :).

So first there is a simple manifest.json file under any new directory you make ,lets for example borderify.

{"manifest_version":2,"name":"Borderify","version":"1.0","description":"Adds a red border to all webpages matching mozilla.org.","icons":{"48":"icons/border-48.png"},"content_scripts":[{"matches":["*://*.mozilla.org/*"],"js":["borderify.js"]}]}

Here the first three keys: manifest_version, name, and version, are mandatory and contain basic metadata for the extension.description is optional, but recommended: it’s displayed in the Add-ons Manager.icons is optional, but recommended: it allows you to specify an icon for the extension, that will be shown in the Add-ons Manager. The most interesting key here is content_scripts, which tells Firefox to load a script into Web pages whose URL matches a specific pattern. In this case, we’re asking Firefox to load a script called “borderify.js” into all HTTP or HTTPS pages served from “mozilla.org” or any of its subdomains.

If you do need to specify an add-on ID, include the applications key in manifest.json and set its id property.

"applications":{"gecko":{"id":"borderify@example.com"}}

Create the “icons” directory directly under the “borderify” directory. Save an icon there named “border-48.png”. As our manifest.json promised that we would have an icon at “icons/border-48.png”.

Finally, create a file called “borderify.js” directly under the “borderify” directory. Give it this content:

document.body.style.border ="5px solid red";

So finally we finished our code then we have to add this add-ons to our Firefox Browser. You can do that simply by watching this video :).

I hope you understood this code. Here some of the images of the event :).

And the image after the event. You can find me easily sat down most left with weedy eyes as did not sleep from 3 days and travelled more than 800 kms in last 3 days.

There is a long time from Mozilla Delhi went on a hibernate so its time to wake up the community. To rejuvenate the community some members took initiative. Thus Pushpita and Bhuvnesh planned to organize Mozcoffee V11 on July 15 at Qutub Spring House, Delhi.

I had two events on same day , one is Hackathon Random Hacks of India in Gurgaon at 9 AM where my team members wait for me and another was MozCoffee at 11 AM, i preferred first to go to MozCoffee as it was necessary to wake up the Community.The main agenda of this MozCoffee was to discuss about the current projects of Activate Mozilla Campaign.

So I reached by 10.30 AM at the venue. Pushpita and me reached at the same time 😀 . Bhuvnesh Sir was already at the venue. More attendees began to join us from 10.45 onwards. I was so happy to some newbies join us as they were interested in Open Source Contribution. So I and Sanyam Bhaiya introduce them to open Source and tell them about how to contribute to Mozilla Projects and Mozilla Campus Club. This was first time I introduce some one to Open Source though it was not official talk 😛 .

After that Sanyam Bhaiya told about various Mozilla Projects after that Pushpita explained about the Activate Mozilla Campaign. She also highlighted other projects for non- tech peoples.

Ad-blocking is one of the important aspects of privacy protection in people’s lives. Mozilla knew it last year when they launched Firefox Focus for iOS, a mobile web-browser with inbuilt ad-blocker which is enabled by default. Now, Firefox Focus has been released for the Android operating system.

The web browser builds on top of the iOS version and has extra features including Ad Tracker counter (shows the number of ads blocked, Notification reminder (reminds Firefox is still running) and disable tracker blocker (an option to disable ad-blocker).

According to Firefox’s product manager, Barbara Bermes, the new Firefox Focus is faster, and it consumes lesser data while browsing.

Firefox Focus is the still simplest web browser I have ever seen. Deleting the history and cookies as simple as tapping the dustbin present on the screen. And it does what it promises.

This is another major announcement from the house of Mozilla after the recent release of Firefox 54 which improves Firefox’s multiprocess abilities up to four content processes. However, E10S-multi is yet to reach all the users. Here is how you can enable it manually.

I think Mozilla is now definitely ahead of Google who is also baking ad-blocking capabilities into Chrome. However, it would be at far bigger scale than Firefox as it would be rollout across all platforms where Chrome exists.

The event took place in Auditorium of my own college Northern India Engineering College on 28th January 2017. As I was the organizer of the event so there were lot of work i had to done like taking permission for the event, publicity of the event in the college and in other colleges too and to set whole setup in Auditorium and some other stuffs too. So on final D-Day i reached the college at 10AM to make arrangement. Attendee start coming from earlier of 12 noon.

From 12.15 pm around we started event.

Sanyam(CuriousLearner) bhaiya start from introducing people to the FOSS and open source and about the open source contribution benefit. After that he introduced all to Git and taught peoples how to use Git. This is the session where all the peoples got their hand dirty on their laptops with Terminals. Peoples with Windows OS faced some issues then i helped them with download the Git Bash for Windows.It was also a great session for me also as i did not know that too much about Git.

After that session we took a break of around 20 minutes for some lunch but in that time also Sanyam Bhaiya did not stop also, in that time also Bhaiya told us about his own journey of Mozilla and his projects.That willingness of Bhaiya to share his knowledge inspired me too much for working hard and also for contributing to Mozilla Organization.

After that break we started with A Frame and Web VR.This session was also a practical session in which peoples had to write codes in <A assets> which is same like as of HTML.With the help of A Frame any page can be designed easily in a very good manner.

After that session we gave swags(stickers) of Mozilla to all attendees and took a feedback too from all of them.

So overall for me it was a great event as i learned a lot of things from this event as i was organizer i got to learn that organizing of a event is not such too easy as it seems. And i can not explain in words about Sanyam Bhaiya how such a great human being he is. This was the 3rd meet with him but i got to know more about him from this event.